The word rest

"So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God's rest also cease from their labors as God did from his." — Hebrews 4:9-10

I read the word rest this morning in Hebrews and I stopped. Not because I did not know the word. Because I have been saying it my whole life and I am not sure I have ever meant the same thing twice.

When the children were small, rest meant sleep. It meant the twenty minutes after lunch when all three of them were down and the house went quiet and I sat on the couch with my eyes closed and did not move. I did not sleep either, most of the time. I just sat there in the quiet and let the noise drain out of me like water out of a bathtub, and that was enough.

When I was teaching, rest meant summer. It meant the last day of school when I closed the classroom door and walked to the car and sat there in the parking lot for a minute before starting the engine, just feeling the weight of the year lift. I loved teaching. I also loved the moment the teaching stopped for a while.

When Earl was sick, rest meant something I could not have. The nights were long and the days were longer and the word rest became a thing other people did in other houses. I would lie in bed next to him and listen to him breathe and rest was not the word for anything that was happening.

Now I am seventy-seven and retired and alone in a quiet house with a dog who sleeps eighteen hours a day, and I still do not know what rest means. I have more of it than I have ever had. The mornings are mine. The afternoons are mine. Nobody needs me to be anywhere by any particular hour. And some days that feels like freedom and some days it feels like a room with too much space in it, and I am learning that rest is not the absence of work. It is something else. Something I am still figuring out.

The verse says a rest remains. I like that word, remains. It does not say rest has been delivered. It does not say rest is here. It says it remains, which means it is ahead of me still, which means I have not missed it, which means I can stop worrying that the quiet house is the wrong kind of quiet.

A rest remains. I will sit with that today.

Lord, teach me what the rest is for.